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Reviving a river

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff
The river arcs around Jim Bowline’s big sheep pasture and then snakes on down toward the lake. The river is wide. On one side its banks are high, a remnant of a downriver mill that needed the water piled up.
Bowline’s been on this river his whole life. He grew up on this land in Hiltons, this stretch of the North Fork Holston River.
He was one of seven children, poling across the river in an old boat his dad had built to catch the bus. It was quicker than walking the road. He went out every evening as a teen to swim or watch the river flow. He witnessed ice tides, breaking free with shards slicing fish and whole trees.
“Whatever it hit it cut in two,” he said. “Water is a powerful thing.”
He’s walked across the frozen river and watched his dad scoot a boat through slushy rapids to pick up sick neighbors. He was there in 1957 when a flood took 19 rows of his corn and in 1977 when the water was even higher – 18 inches to be exact.
He’s seen the river change, good and bad – the bad in 1929 when a wall of wastewater full of soda ash came crashing down river when a retention pond at Saltville’s Mathieson Alkali Works collapsed. The company was a soda producer, combining limestone and salt. That sort of thing happened sometimes more than once.
Ben Larkey grew up along the North Fork too and remembers as a boy in the early 1940s the river turning white.
“We’d get up in the morning, look out at the river, it looked like milk and if the fish were big enough we’d see them floating down,” Larkey said. “They’d say, ‘Well, Saltville has dumped.’ Sometimes it’d take two or three days to clear up.”
His mother and grandmother wouldn’t let him near the river when it was white. They wouldn’t eat the fish from it then but when it cleared up, Larkey would swim and eat from it like before.
“I got the perception that the adults felt like what happened was wrong but there was not enough power to do anything about it,” Larkey said.  “As a 10 or 11-year-old boy that was the impression that I got.”
Those memories were one reason Larkey attended the North Fork Holston River Mercury TMDL public meeting in Hiltons last week. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality held two informational meetings, the other in Saltville, to explain a study on approximately 82 North Fork river miles stretching from Saltville to the Tennessee state line. That length of river is listed on the impaired waters list due to mercury in the water. The DEQ is working to determine what amount of pollution the North Fork can have and still be healthy, otherwise known as its total maximum daily load or TMDL.
“We’re trying to identify all the potential sources of mercury,” said Shelley Williams, regional TMDL coordinator. “How mercury is getting to the river.”
In addition to the years of historical data, including fish tissue sampling, the department will be collecting water data at eight or nine sites along the 82 river mile stretch of contaminated water.
Mathieson Alkali Works in Saltville merged to become Olin Industries in 1954. Mercury was used it the production of chlorine and caustic soda. Olin Corporation manager of environmental science Keith Roberts said there were potentially spills of mercury into the river.
“There was always a little bit of loss throughout the manufacturing process,” he said. “Most of the waste was sent to pond five but the plant was located right on the river so there could have been some escape.”
Stanley Haynes, Olin Saltville site supervisor, said mercury was discharged into the water but no one really knew that mercury was harmful back then. In 1972 the company closed down in Saltville.
“The fish survive, the mercury hasn’t killed them, but the mercury keeps us from eating the fish,” said Bob Barker who attended the public meeting and is a resident of Hiltons. “I just hope Olin pays through the nose for this because we still have the damage.”
And they have.
Since 1982, as a result of government mandates, the company dredged 1,500 feet of river bottom, put a cap on contaminated pond five and a cover on pond six, set up a wastewater treatment plant and began sampling and studying the river water. Haynes said the company has paid close to $100 million to clean up the Saltville area.
“All the money paid out was provided by Olin; there were no public funds,” Haynes said.
Still there have been posts advising people to not eat the fish from the North Fork for years.
“The acid in the water, it was so high you could hardly keep a chain in your boat, it’d rot it out,” said Bowline.
“We always ate fish and no one ever got sick from eating the fish in our family,” said Brenda Horton, Bowline’s sister. “We didn’t think nothing about it.”
“I’ve not eaten a fish out of that river in years,” Bowline said. “My dad would never give it up until he got a fishbone in his throat and, well, mama never would fry them again.”
Williams said people should be able to swim and eat from their own rivers. She said DEQ is adhering to a 1999 Consent Decree with the Environmental Protection Agency to develop TMDL reports for all 1998 listed impaired streams by 2010. She said after they conduct the pollution study, DEQ will develop a cleanup plan and then implement pollution reduction practices.
“Historically Olin was the largest contributor (of mercury),” Williams said. “They’ve done a lot of studies and a great job and now we’re going to go in and do a study to make sure we’re on the right track.”
She said their preliminary data indicate that the largest contributor of mercury comes from the air. That won’t be an easy fix.
Still, she said, “we’ll look at other sources and where reduction could take place.”
She said the amount of mercury in the water is very small but it accumulates in the fish and can then be passed on to humans.
“The amount of mercury in fish tissue is decreasing,” Williams said.
That was good news for the 20 or so people who attended the public meetings in Saltville and Hiltons last week.
Scott County Supervisor Joe Horton was pleased with the meeting in Hiltons.
“I was impressed with the turnout, they’re very concerned about the health of the river,” said Horton. “A lot of them lived on the river all their lives and they feel like it’s their neighborhood and they want to take care of it the best they can.”
Barker said he’s not sure he’ll be able to eat from the river anytime soon; these types of things take years, he said. He did echo what many by the river have said, “What we really need here more than anything is rain.”
Bowline said it’s been quite a long time since he’s seen a flood like the ones he saw as a boy. Standing in the grass by the very river he’s watched, through all its phases, all his life he said, “I love to see it so blue. Sometimes when you see that green grass and blue water it’s so pretty.”
The next public North Fork Holston River TMDL meeting will be held in Spring 2009.
To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail